dir. Candice T. Cain
Another one from the infamous director of Deck the Heart, with all the familiar low budget production and terrible acting we’ve come to know and love. One of the additional problems facing Baking Up Love is that it doesn’t really know what film it wants to be. Does it want to be a standard Hallmark rom-com, with two one-dimensional men competing for the affections of our simpering heroine? Or does it want to be about a spoiled teenage girl becoming more wholesome and free by learning to bake pumpkin pie with her aunt? Maybe it wants to be a Christian movie, because there are periodic sections dedicated to praising the local church. Maybe it wants to be about the minutiae of a pumpkin baking competition, not least because the film forces viewers to watch several random competitors in every category walk up onto a small stage and smile awkwardly for what feels like forever. There’s a lot of comic relief side characters popping up, almost a new one every scene – though that’s not as frequent an occurrence as someone proudly declaring Morton, Illinois to be “the pumpkin capital of the world”. So there’s a lot going on in this film. Unfortunately, Baking Up Love‘s fundamental biggest problem is that of all the movies it’s trying to be, not a single one of them is any good anyway.
BMDb 